Today’s logic chips and System-on-Chips (SoCs) are ever-growing in size, complexity, and integration density. This drives a continuous need to develop novel and advanced ways to efficiently test such devices after manufacturing. High-bandwidth IJTAG over SSN (HB-IJTAG) is one such innovation that leverages the high-speed and parallel Streaming Scan Network (SSN) bus to concurrently access many local IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) networks.However, every time the high-bandwidth IJTAG access mode is activated, it must first be configured through the global IJTAG network. The initial configuration and subsequent reconfigurations constitute a substantial test time overhead due to the lower shift speed and serial nature of global IJTAG.This paper introduces wide-ranging enhancements to the high-bandwidth IJTAG access to allow for persistent utilization of the high-speed SSN bus. By eliminating the reasons for the expensive reconfigurations, high-bandwidth IJTAG can remain active throughout the entire test session. This results in a significant reduction of test setup time and more efficient test delivery. Our experiments clearly demonstrate these benefits in different pattern delivery scenarios. Persistently using the high-bandwidth data delivery reduced the relevant IJTAG pattern execution time by up to 243x, yielding an up to 18x lower overall test time for SSN ATPG patterns.

As Systems-on-Chip (SOC) designs grow in complexity, so do the challenges associated with testing them. Some of the obstacles SOC designers face include limited I/O and scan channels, routing and timing closure issues, increasing manufacturing test and defect diagnosis time, and growing test data volume. Various design-for-test (DFT) techniques exist to handle complex SOC designs that have multiple cores. One new DFT implementation technique is the streaming scan network (SSN) high-bandwidth parallel data bus. SSN addresses many of the SOC challenges by providing an optimized packet-based scan data delivery system. It also dynamically optimizes test time by adjusting the data applied to each core. However, SSN is limited to delivering scan data; it cannot be used to deliver data to individual instruments in a physical block using the IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) network. This paper introduces a new high-bandwidth IJTAG DFT technology that leverages the existing high-speed parallel SSN bus to drive the serial IJTAG network. It describes the DFT implementation methodology, the impact to the backend in terms of timing and SDC, and how verification was done by Intel as they deployed it on multiple dielets in their next generation client CPU. Moreover, data on area overhead and the overall test cost savings achieved is presented.

Some applications, especially in the area of multimedia processing, need to be implemented in a multichip platform, due to their size. An efficient communication infrastructure for such systems may be designed with the use of the Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). However, a network for multi-chip systems require a scalable architecture. Moreover, for multimedia purposes, such NoC should support a multicast transmission mode. In order to meet this requirements, we propose the NoMC (Network-on-Multi-Chip) which is a hierarchical interconnect system, designed for multi-chip systems. A performance of the proposed network is assessed utilizing a model of the MVC (Multiview Video Coding) coder. In such system, the multicast transmission mode may yield an overall bandwidth gain up to 30%. Moreover, the synthesis results show that the proposed network elements are easily synthesizable for the FPGA devices.

The paper presents a new and efficient architecture for H.264/AVC video encoder control. The architecture of mode decision and cost estimation module is implemented with the use of bit-serial arithmetic and provides pipelined processing of image blocks. The module is designed to support FPGA devices. It has been shown that the design is capable to perform at a very low clock speed, thus it is a suitable solution for wireless communications. The proposed modules have been implemented in Verilog HDL and synthesized for a Xilinx Virtex II family device